Since the 1990s, a favorite villain conjured by US rulers to strike fear into the hearts of the American public has been the Islamic terrorist, who supposedly is part of a vast international network named Al Qaeda, headed by the diabolical Osama bin Laden, master of trained operatives in over forty countries. No hard evidence of such a wide-reaching coordinated terrorist foe has been found.22 Usually left unmentioned is how the United States helped organize, finance, and mobilize the Islamic militants to fight a regressive war against revolutionary Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention into that country.23
To be sure, real terrorists do exist, a sparse scattering of poorly organized grouplets. They must be stopped before they can commit their wanton acts. But this gives no government—not even the one in Washington—license to bomb and destroy whole countries. Such massive military aggression delivers a much greater destruction than anything done by the jihadists and is destined to create rather than eliminate Islamic terrorists.
This seems to be the view held by Osama bin Laden and his followers, who see themselves involved in a defensive war against a merciless aggressor. They seem less impelled by some blind hatred and envy of America and more by a desire to get the American empire off their backs. They hate the empire because of the terrible things it does to them, their homelands, and their region of the world, bringing them exploitation, death, and destruction on a grand scale.24